Sunday, 6 January 2013

From Euston to Outer Space: Obituary of a Great Londoner

Charles Chilton, who has died aged 95,
created two of the BBC’s classic 1950s radio serials, Riders of the Range and
Journey into Space and in 1963 wrote the stage show Oh, What a Lovely War!

Chilton was a prolific talent, writing and
producing scores of popular and successful BBC radio programmes. The adventures
of Jet Morgan in Journey into Space recounted man’s conquest of the Moon and an
expedition to Mars. The serial ran for only two years, but it enthralled an entire
generation for whom a lunar landing was still a far-fetched fantasy, and by
1955 it had built an audience of five million, so becoming the last radio drama
to record higher ratings than television .

His earlier radio success, Riders of the
Range, had been launched in January 1949. Chilton drew on authentic background
material about the Wild West, assembled from documents and diaries of
contemporary Americans, to shape the adventures of his cowboy hero, Jeff Arnold
(played by Paul Carpenter), and his companions Luke, Jim Forsythe and faithful
dog Rustler.

The Western saga captured the imagination
of post-war listener. In 1950 he was asked to script a comic strip version for
the popular boys’ paper Eagle, and travelled to Tombstone, Arizona, where he
was made an Honorary Marshal.

Chilton went on to produce the comedy
series Take It From Here, followed by documentaries on subjects as diverse as
Victorian Britain, the General Strike, the Mormons and the American Civil War.
Then his treatment of the Great War, based on his father’s experiences, brought
him enormous success on the London stage with Oh, What a Lovely War!

In one of the most bitter anti-war plays
ever staged in London, Chilton juxtaposed the slaughter of the trenches with
the music hall songs of the day, a device acclaimed by the critic Kenneth Tynan
as “a double coup: it is revolutionary alike in content and form”. Three months
after opening at the Theatre Royal Stratford, east London, the show transferred
to Wyndham’s in the West End, and in 1969 was filmed by Richard Attenborough.

Charles Frederick William Chilton was born
on June 15 1917 in Euston, north London, the son of a clerk at the family firm
of painters and decorators who had been posted to the Western Front that spring
and never returned. He was killed at Arras on the first day of the German
spring offensive in March 1918. At 19 years old, he had never met his newborn
son.

Charles’s mother remarried after the war,
but died when he was five. He was sent to live with his paternal grandmother, a
widow with 13 children all living together on one floor of a rundown Georgian
house in Sandwich Street, Euston.

Leaving St Pancras Church School when he
was 14, Charles was apprenticed to an electric sign maker, but while walking
home one day in 1932 found himself passing the newly-built Broadcasting House
in Portland Place, home of the BBC. He asked the commissionaire if there were
any jobs.

Discovering that the lad was a war orphan,
the commissionaire suggested he apply for a post in the publications department.
Charles was hired and by 15 was delivering copies of Radio Times around
Broadcasting House.

He later moved to a job as an assistant in
the gramophone library, where he discovered his love of music, especially jazz.
When in the 1930s the BBC began to play selections of recorded music to fill
the gaps between live broadcasts and the midnight news, he helped compile the
playlists, and persuaded his bosses that perhaps one night a week they could
play some jazz.

Chilton himself was allowed to introduce
the music, making him one of the BBC’s first disc jockeys. But when John Watt,
the head of variety, heard one of Chilton’s evening broadcasts, he thought his
Cockney voice sounded too common and ordered him off the air. Without Watt’s
knowledge, Chilton was sent for elocution lessons and reinstated.

He started a BBC Jazz Band (he played
guitar) and played in another band in the evenings and at weekends. By 1940,
promoted to assist Leslie Perowne in the variety department, he had established
himself at the BBC as a producer of music programmes. His Radio Rhythm Club,
which ran for five years, proved popular with British troops throughout the
war.

In 1941 Chilton joined the RAF as an air
gunner in Bomber Command, but was later assigned to a training squadron,
instructing aircrew to navigate by the stars, developing as he did so an
interest in astronomy that would later lead to the radio adventures of Jet
Morgan. He continued to play in his band and wrote and recorded programmes for
the BBC’s Overseas Radio Broadcasting Services, a forerunner of British Forces
Radio.

In early 1945, on the way to Ceylon to work
for South East Asia Command running radio services for British troops in Burma,
Chilton was reported missing, presumed dead. He had sailed from Britain to
Egypt and then on to North West India where he was waiting for a flight to
Ceylon. Repeatedly delayed to make room for more important passengers, Chilton
decided to travel on by train, a journey that took nearly three weeks. When he
finally arrived in Ceylon, he found that the aircraft to which he had finally
been allocated had crashed, killing everyone on board. As his name was on the
passenger list, he was presumed to be dead.

At Radio South East Asia he shared an
office with David Jacobs, a young able seaman, who later played all the minor
voices on Journey Into Space.

Returning to the BBC after the war, Chilton
worked with some of the best-known names in music and broadcasting, Roy Plomley
and Alistair Cooke among them. He also began to develop an interest in popular
American music, and at the end of the 1940s was sent to America to research
programme ideas. The result was Riders of the Range, which ran from 1950 until
1953 and at its peak drew a weekly audience of 10 million listeners.

As well as writing three weekly comic
strips, and writing, producing and directing at least one weekly live radio
show, Chilton also worked on other radio projects, and had a lengthy spell
producing The Goon Show.

On a family holiday to Italy in 1958,
Chilton stopped in northern France to find his father’s grave, but was unable
to locate a headstone at the official cemetery. He eventually found his
father’s name inscribed on a wall commemorating some 35,000 soldiers who died
in the battle of Arras, all “missing, presumed dead”.

This episode led to Chilton’s radio
programme A Long, Long Trail, first broadcast in 1961. Gerry Raffles, director
of Theatre Workshop, Stratford, heard it and asked him to write a stage version
of the programme: that turned out to be Oh, What a Lovely War!

At the BBC Chilton remained as busy as
ever, producing radio documentaries on subjects ranging from music hall and
Edwardian London to the American Civil War, using popular song as a way of
linking different sections together. His programmes also satisfied Chilton’s
never-ending thirst for knowledge, a result of his lack of formal education.

In 1972 he was awarded an MBE for services
to radio. He retired from the BBC after 46 years, but continued to work for the
corporation as a freelance for many years.

Chilton produced a number of books on the
Old West including The Book of the West and the men who created its legends
(1961) and Discovery of the American West (1970). He wrote three science
fiction novels, Journey Into Space (1954), The Red Planet (1956) and The World
in Peril (1960), all based on his 1950s radio serial.

He was still writing in his eighties, and
lecturing at a British arm of the University of New York in London. Every
Sunday morning he could be found conducting walking tours around Hampstead for
The Original London Walks.

Charles Chilton married, in 1947, Penelope
Colbeck, whom he met when she joined the BBC’s wartime gramophone department as
a newly-qualified shorthand typist. She survives him with their daughter and
two sons.

From The Daily Telegraph.

A
London Walk costs £9 – £7 concession. To join a London Walk, simply meet your
guide at the designated tube station at the appointed time. Details of all
London Walks can be found at www.walks.com.